In a recent webinar that we hosted with Honeybook, we shared some of our Facebook ad results to show why we believe so much in using Facebook ads to grow your business.

We received a ton of great feedback from our webinar, and lots of people were asking about strategies they could use to see the same results.

Now, before we dive into today’s example, we need to say one disclaimer: Facebook ads are not magic.

We repeat: this is not magic.

We’ve spent many years and tens of thousands of dollars learning and testing and analyzing Facebook and Instagram ads, both for our businesses and those of our clients.

There isn’t one “quick tip” or hack we can share that will guarantee your instant success running ads.

There are however, lots of tested strategies and methods that you can implement to start seeing real results and start having a significant impact on your business!

Using Facebook Ads to Grow Your Business

Whether you’re looking to add more subscribers to your email list, boost sales, increase the number of inquiries for your services, or drive more traffic to your website, Facebook and Instagram ads can help you get there.

And what’s more: Facebook and Instagram ads can accomplish these goals at a waaayyy more affordable cost, with results you can actually measure.

This is why we love Facebook ads + make sure they are a part of all of our clients’ marketing strategies.

Today, we’re going to share just one example of a recent campaign that we ran on Facebook and Instagram to show you how we added over 300 leads to our email list for under $100 – and how you can do the same for your business.

Generating Leads Using Facebook and Instagram Ads

To keep things simple + transparent, we’re going to dive into one recent campaign that we ran for our free 22-page guide, our Facebook Ads Bible.

Here are some of the details:

• We ran this ad for 2 weeks (April 13 – 27)
• We used the lead generation campaign objective
• We had 4 ad sets in our campaign to start
• Each ad set had a $10 daily budget
• We used both Facebook and Instagram ad placements
• We tested cold, lookalike, and warm audiences

Here are the summary of this campaign’s results:

As you can see, we spent under $100 and generated over 300 new leads for our business.

And while this is a snippet of the campaigns we’re currently running, we are pretty darn happy with the results for this ad 🙂

Think of it this way: we paid under $.30 to not just reach each person in our ideal audience but for those people to join our email list.

We also received a ton of engagement in terms of shares, likes, clicks, and comments – which is a win, win for us!

We share all of this to say: you can get these results for your business, too.

3 Takeaways from this Lead Generation Campaign

So before we share some of the strategies + tips you can use to run similar campaigns for your business, we want to take a minute and share some of our takeaways:

1. Cold vs Warm Audiences

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the terms, a cold audience refers to people who do not already know about you or your business. A warm audience is people who have already engaged with you or your business.

Usually, warm audiences tend to perform better and cost less money per action (signing up, downloading your ebook, registering for your webinar, etc) because you have already built up a like, know, and trust factor with them.

For this campaign, we tested two completely cold audiences and two lookalike audiences (our retargeting campaign was different in this case). Surprisingly, our cold audiences are the ones that performed the best and cost the least amount per lead for this campaign. This leads us to believe we’re getting a loooot better and targeting our ideal customers and speaking directly to their pain points with our ad copy and images!

2. Facebook vs Instagram Ad Placements

For this campaign, our Facebook ad placements performed the best, with mobile far surpassing desktop (no surprise there).

That being said, some of our Instagram leads cost us half of what some of the Facebook leads cost ($0.09 on Instagram vs $0.18 on Facebook).

Just another reason testing is so important!

3. Male vs. Female Targeting

Typically, our audience skews towards women. Many of our campaign results follow our website statistics and relate to a largely female audience.

For this campaign, 293 of our 338 leads were MEN!

Perhaps it was because Pete wrote the ad copy for this one 😉 or perhaps it’s because more men are looking to learn Facebook ads… the truth is there could be a ton of different reasons why we saw these results – so it’s something we’re going to be looking more into and testing more in the future!

Now onto the good stuff..

3 Tips for Running Lead Generation Ads on Facebook

So now it’s your turn – let’s start generating leads (+ getting great results) for your business.

Here are 3 tips that you start implementing today that will have a significant impact on your lead generation campaigns.

1. Test First, Narrow Later

As you can see from our results, testing is so so important. We tested our ad sets, targeting, ad copy and images, call-to-actions, and more.

Once we saw which ad set was performing the best, we then turned the other 3 ad sets off and funneled that budget into our best performing ad set. You can do the same with your targeting options, placements, and ads as you start driving traffic to your campaign.

2. Layer Your Targeting

Targeting can be one of the trickiest parts of running great ads on Facebook and Instagram.

We’ll be sharing all of our best strategies in our full course ( you can click here to stay in the loop for the launch! ), but one thing we always encourage people to do when running ads is to layer your targeting options. This one strategy makes an enormous difference in your ability to reach your dream clients for the best cost.

No idea was layering is? No sweat! We cover this lesson in our free 5-day email course 🙂

3. Automate Your Follow Up Process

The best part about this campaign’s results is that all 338 people were automatically added to our list and entered into a funnel designed specifically for them.

Since this was a lead generation campaign, we used Zapier to integrate our lead form on Facebook with our email list on ActiveCampaign.

We tagged the new leads to enter them into an email sequence that delivered follow up emails. These emails not only delivered their free download but gave our new leads tons of extra, free content related to Facebook ads.

Our biggest advice for growing your list is not to abandon your newbies. Don’t offer a freebie or invite a user to register for a webinar and then never communicate with them again!

Engage, engage, engage! Provide value + overdeliver to build up even more of the Like, Know, and Trust factors.

If you’re ready to start generating leads for your business using Facebook + Instagram, we’d love for you to download our (totally free) guide, the Facebook Ads Bible. We put this 22-page guide together specifically for you: the creative entrepreneur who wants to grow his or her business online with Facebook ads.

How you can help: Which tip did you find most helpful? What was your biggest “aha!” moment? What else do you want to learn about growing your business online?

We want to help. We love marketing + we love helping other entrepreneurs, so drop us a comment below to let us know how we can better serve you 🙂